Should Big Games in March Sway the N.B.A. Draft in June? The Numbers Say Yes

Donte DiVincenzo will be waiting for his name to be called Thursday night at the N.B.A. draft in Brooklyn in no small part because of his stellar performance on what had heretofore been his career’s biggest stage.

Villanova defeated Michigan, 79-62, in last season’s men’s N.C.A.A. championship game on the strength of DiVincenzo’s monster game: 31 points on 15 shots, including five 3-pointers; 5 rebounds; and, for good measure, 2 blocks.

“We saw that every day in practice, but he played on a team where we didn’t need him to do that a lot,” Villanova Coach Jay Wright said of DiVincenzo, a 21-year-old guard who was a redshirt sophomore last season.

Wright added, “It just happened to be, the night we needed him to do it was the championship game, and everyone was watching.”

Although DiVincenzo improved his stock with an outstanding performance at the draft combine last month, that doesn’t fully explain why he is generally expected to be drafted somewhere from the high teens to the mid-20s of the first round, or why it will be a surprise if he falls much lower.

Some, or perhaps a lot, of the credit is owed to that championship game.

In February, one mock draft echoed the conventional wisdom when it predicted that DiVincenzo would be picked 30th as the final selection of the N.B.A. draft’s first round — in 2019.

Several current and former N.B.A. front-office hands acknowledged that the tournament, despite representing just a small part of any college player’s career, inevitably looms large in their decision-making.

“It’s the last thing you see for most players who are drafted,” Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey said.

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In February, conventional wisdom held that DiVincenzo would be picked 30th as the final selection of the N.B.A. draft’s first round — in 2019. Then his stock rose drastically.CreditLaurence Kesterson/Associated Press

Bobby Marks, a former front-office figure who is now an analyst with ESPN, chalked it up to “human nature.”

“We get caught up in the N.C.A.A. tournament and a player goes on a deep run, and you look at that body of work, and that stands out,” he said. “Maybe an owner starts to chime in.”

Several years ago, two academic economists decided to expose N.B.A. front offices’ “irrational exuberance” in giving too much weight to a prospect’s performance in the N.C.A.A. tournament when making draft decisions.

But after they crunched the numbers, they found that this exuberance, while real, actually turned out to be rational. According to their research paper, published last year in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, players who unexpectedly rose on the draft board after above-expectations performances in the N.C.A.A. tournament tended to be better N.B.A. players.

“If you compare two players who both are No. 10 draft picks and compare the performance of the player who had a bump — who moved up because of March Madness — to one who didn’t, the one who moved up tends to do better in the N.B.A., mostly in offensive statistics,” said Anne Preston, a professor of economics at Haverford College. She wrote the paper with her husband, Casey Ichniowski, who was the chairman of Columbia Business School’s Management Division and who died in 2014.

“What we found in looking at how these players played once they got to the N.B.A. is, N.B.A. personnel should be putting a lot more weight on this,” Preston said.

The paper used regression equations on players drafted between 1997 and 2010 to evaluate which factors influenced when they were selected. The research relied on an average of three pretournament mock drafts to determine whether a player moved up in the draft after the tournament. It necessarily did not account for players who did not compete in the N.C.A.A. tournament, whether because they came straight from high school, like LeBron James; from a European league, like Dirk Nowitzki; or from college teams that failed to qualify for the tournament, like the most recent No. 1 overall picks, Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz.

And if the paper’s conclusions seem surprising, its authors would agree. “When we first started looking at performance in the N.B.A., we were pretty blown away that it had this effect,” Preston said.

An early draft of the paper cited the trajectories of Derrick Rose and Ty Lawson as two that anecdotally illustrated their findings: Both point guards, each of whom played in N.C.A.A. title games, saw their actual draft spots rise from their expected ones, and for a time enjoyed very successful N.B.A. careers. Rose won a Most Valuable Player Award before his career was hampered by injuries; Lawson’s several years as a major contributor to a playoff contender are stellar for a No. 18 pick.

More recently, there’s Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum. As a college freshman, Tatum was crucial to Duke’s surprise run to the 2017 Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament championship. He was drafted third — though most mock drafts had his fellow wing Josh Jackson, who disappeared in Kansas’s round-of-eight loss that year, going there. As a rookie this past season, Tatum was perhaps Boston’s best player in its surprise run to the Eastern Conference finals.

But the numbers suggested that N.B.A. teams’ June excitement for players who had especially good Marches and Aprils was justified.

Specifically:

• A player on a team that had one more win in the tournament than its seed history predicted and who scored 4 more points and had one more assist per game in the tournament than expected moved up an average of more than one whole draft slot from his position in pretournament mock drafts.

• The tendency was amplified among the hottest prospects: For those listed in the pretournament mock drafts’ first rounds, one more win than expected in the N.C.A.A. tournament and small increases in points and assists translated to moving five slots up.

• Overperforming on a team that underperformed in the tournament still helped players move up in the draft.

• These bumps correlated with N.B.A. minutes per game, scoring and player efficiency in a way that is “positive and significant.” It also shows up in N.B.A. postseason statistics.

The paper’s findings begin to make more sense in the context of the nature of college basketball’s postseason. Unlike dreary early season nonconference games, virtually all conference games, and especially N.C.A.A. tournament games, are played against standout competition. Unlike the heart of the regular season, these games have high stakes, with increased fan and media attention. Put it all together, and N.C.A.A. tournament play is the closest college basketball gets to the pros.

“If a guy you liked during the regular season then played extremely well during the tournament, it helped him, mainly because it’s a pressure situation,” the former Nets general manager Billy King said. “Especially the N.C.A.A. or their conference tournament, it’s one-or-done: You lose and you go home. You see guys that can handle that.”

On Wednesday, DiVincenzo said that his title-game performance would not be what made a team draft him.

“They’ve seen me since the day I’ve stepped foot on campus,” he said. “They’ve watched me plenty of times. They’re not making the decision based on one game.”

However, he added, “It shows a lot that I stepped up in that setting.”

Marc Tracy has covered college sports for The New York Times since 2014. @marcatracy

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: N.B.A. Prospect Rides the Crest of a Big Game. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe